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Charging up in Edison, Tesla has a message: 'GAS LOL'

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"GAS LOL" -- perhaps the greatest license plate of all time. It's on the Patel family of Princeton's Tesla, seen charging at the Edison Tesla charging station on Saturday, Aug. 23, 2014.
(Brian Amaral/NJ.com)

In the interest of pointless provocation, I went out to the new Tesla supercharger station at Edison's Menlo Park Mall yesterday to see if I could stir up trouble.

Nikola Tesla's namesake electric car company had just installed the new charging station and opened it on Friday, right in Thomas Edison's backyard. Edison, the inventor of the incandescent bulb and the phonograph, was known as the Wizard of Menlo Park, and contemporary pop historians believe that Edison and Tesla had a fierce rivalry.

But I didn't find trouble. What I found, instead, was not a story about Edison vs. Tesla but perhaps the greatest license plate of all time: "GAS LOL."

"GAS LOL" was on the back of a ruby-red Tesla vehicle, a cheeky dismissal of the type of fossil fuels that most cars today rely on but that the Tesla does not. The GAS LOL Tesla was empty, with the electric charger sticking out of the back as the car "filled up." (New Jersey: You can't pump your own gas, but you can pump your own electrons!)

It was not long until the Patel family, of Princeton, came back to their car. And for a couple that gets a lot of comments about their car, and its fantastic license plate, Sanjay and Dhanya Patel were surprisingly patient and generous with their time, showing me almost every cool little thing on their Tesla. For example: There's no "engine" in the front, so it's sometimes a strange sight when the Patels are in a parking lot, putting groceries under their hood.

"The future is very bright" for Tesla, said Sanjay Patel. "I think everyone should buy one."

(That's a difficult prospect in New Jersey, where you can't buy one right now in a showroom. You have to go to Pennsylvania, New York or the world wide web for that.)

The Patels love this car. The inside is space-age type stuff, appropriate for Elon Musk, the company's founder, who also wants to fly into space. There's no front panel with radio buttons and handbrake like there is on the 2004 Honda CRV parked nearby. There's just a big computer. You can automatically raise or lower the suspension on the touch-screen. The music, the A/C, the sunroof controls -- all manipulable with an iPad-like interface. The computer has an actual Internet browser, which means they can read NJ.com any time they want.

After they charged up the Tesla, the Patel family could drive more than 250 miles without charging up again. An hour with the plug in gets them about 200 miles, Sanjay Patel said.

That's where some of the drawbacks of the Tesla, as it stands now, come into play. You need a Tesla charging station every few hundred miles if you want to travel long distances, and there are some dead zones in America at the moment. You can make it from New York to California, but not through some parts of Mississippi or Oklahoma. The New York Times caused a stir in the automotive industry when its test drive went spectacularly awry.

The Patels said they haven't had any problems. As their Tesla charged on Saturday, they had a meal in the mall food court. They have driven all the way to Virginia, stopping at charging stations along the way. And the network of Tesla charging stations is going to grow, the company promises. It's free to charge up your Tesla.

They got their first Tesla in September at the behest of their son, Sunny, who is in his third year at Georgia Tech and a bit of a techie himself.

"GAS LOL" was also his idea.

(To answer the common criticism of electric vehicles: Yes, the plurality of electricity is generated by coal, so no, the Tesla is not a perfectly green machine, but according to the federal government, it's cheaper to drive an electric car, and according to the Sierra Club, it's better for the environment.)

It's actually the Patels' second Tesla; the first one was in a bad car accident and had to be replaced in May. Sanjay wanted me to mention that the car is very safe; although the vehicle itself was wrecked, the family was fine.

Sanjay drove a few feet in the parking lot to show off what it was like, but it was a blink-and-you'll-miss-it experience. The car turns on in proximity to a key fob, and there's no engine to turn over, so "off" sounds just like "on." The car glided forward effortlessly, noiselessly, under Patel's control.

It is a pretty cool car. Even the most die-hard #TeamEdison type has to admit that. I'm the person who wrote a lengthy screed declaring as ahistorical propaganda the contemporary geeks' insistence that Nikola Tesla was the best guy ever and that Thomas Edison was a useless tool. (The facts: Edison and Tesla actually admired each other, and the modern trend of devaluing Edison is a silly and incorrect one. Also, Edison didn't kill Topsy the elephant, so stop it with that one.)

But the company itself says that it installed the Tesla supercharger in Edison for convenience, not rivalry. The front parking lot in the Menlo Park Mall is right off Route 1, near the interchange with the Garden State Parkway, Interstate 287, and the New Jersey Turnpike. Convenient, for people who want to get from point A to point B and need a particular type of charging station nearby.